The Boy with No Boots

by Sheila Jeffries

  ‘Pull yourself together, girl,’ said Sally desperately. ‘It’s hard enough for us here.’

  ‘None of you know what it’s like to be me,’ raged Ethie. She dragged a chair out and slumped down on it, put her hands over her burning face and drew a savage breath into her lungs.

  ‘Ethie, stop it,’ pleaded Kate, putting her arm round her sister and rubbing her back gently.

  But the kindness seemed to trigger Ethie into a final explosion, like a boil bursting. She clenched her fists and pounded the table with them. ‘You don’t UNDERSTAND,’ she wailed, then jumped to her feet and slammed out of the room, returning seconds later with another slam. ‘I’m going to feed the chickens. At least the chickens don’t care whether I smile or not.’

  Kate and her parents looked at each other.

  ‘She’s getting worse,’ said Sally.

  ‘No she isn’t, Mummy, she’s always been like it. We can’t make her any different,’ said Kate. ‘We just have to look on the bright side.’

  ‘What bright side? She hasn’t got one.’

  ‘She has,’ said Kate. ‘She works so hard. And she does laugh with me sometimes, when she hasn’t got her nose in a book.’

  ‘Some gloomy book, I don’t doubt. What do you think, Bertie?’ Sally looked at her husband who had sat looking uncomfortable.

  ‘I don’t get involved in women’s disputes,’ he said calmly.

  ‘So what was it you were going to tell me?’ asked Kate. ‘About Polly and Daisy. I’d rather know.’

  Bertie nodded, his eyes sad. ‘We’re sorry, dear, but Polly and Daisy had to be sold. We couldn’t afford to bring them up here.’

  Kate stared at him wordlessly. She thought about the gentle Shire horse she’d loved. She and Daisy had a special bond. The big horse had always been so careful and kind around Kate when she was little, standing like a statue, afraid to move her huge feet in case she trod on the little girl who loved her.

  Kate noticed her parents’ doleful expressions.

  ‘Oh, I expect it’s for the best,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about me. I’ve got plenty to be happy about. Now I must be off to work or I’ll be late. I’ll take the toast with me.’

  Bertie was looking at her with a perplexed expression in his eyes. He got up and followed his daughter’s straight back out into the morning light. ‘Wait a minute, Kate. I’ll walk to the gate with you.’

  She turned and gave him a smile that turned his heart over. ‘Come on then, Daddy.’ She linked her arm into his and they set off on the half-mile walk to the racing stables, Kate carrying Little Foxy’s bridle which she’d been cleaning.

  ‘I want to give you some advice, Kate,’ said Bertie. ‘If I can get a word in edgeways.’

  ‘Of course,’ she laughed.

  ‘This is serious, Kate. I love you dearly, and you don’t fool me. I know how upset you must be over those two horses. I admire the way you keep so cheerful, it’s a wonderful gift you have, Kate – and – and don’t waste it.’

  ‘How could I waste it?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Don’t waste it on someone you don’t love. It’s your life, Kate. I don’t want you to suffer because you want to please us. You be true to yourself. Do you understand me?’

  They stopped in a gateway, and Kate looked thoughtfully at her father. He always knew exactly what was in her heart.

  ‘I never want to leave you, Daddy. You’ve been like a guardian angel,’ she said. ‘But yes, you’re right, I’ve got some thinking to do.’

  ‘You may have to leave me one day. But we’ll always be close, Kate – even when I’m gone. I want to see you happy – truly deeply happy, dear, not just putting a pretty face on it. I’ve watched you, Kate, and I know – I know there’s some deep-down thing bothering you. You’ve lost your sparkle.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, Kate. But please – think about your life and your future. Don’t let me, or anyone, hold you back, girl. You do what you’ve got to do.’ Bertie was looking at her intensely and his words were full of passion as they stood in the gateway overlooking the estuary. ‘If you love someone, you let them go, let them be free. You are a blessed gift to this world, Kate, you spread your wings and fly free.’

  Kate’s eyes stared past him, across the shining water to the distant hills, then back to the brimming flood of love and caring in her father’s gaze.

  ‘You’re not responsible for Ethie, or me, or your mother.’ Bertie gave her a little pat. ‘You spread your wings and fly free.’

  He wagged a finger and looked at her under his brows, a fixed stare that put a seal on his words.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy. I’m glad you care so much.’ Kate kissed him on his pale cheek and walked on by herself, swinging the bridle. She looked down at her legs in the long boots and riding breeches, and thought how lovely it would be to wear a swishy red skirt again and feel like a woman. She found herself slowing down, dawdling a little, listening to the hum of bees in the blackthorn blossom, and suddenly she remembered Freddie telling her the Innisfree poem, explaining to her about the ‘bee-loud glade’. It had been a magic time.

  ‘That’s what I’m missing from my life,’ Kate thought suddenly. ‘The magic. The magic is missing.’

  She remembered Freddie’s story of how he had saved up and bought the lorry at sixteen. It inspired her. Surely if Freddie could do that, then she could ‘spread her wings’ and take charge of her own life, couldn’t she?

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  ‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ Ethie said impatiently to her father. ‘I know the tides by now. I’ve been doing it for six months now.’

  Bertie nodded, his face pale as he sat in the wicker chair by the stove. ‘I wish I was well enough to go with you.’

  ‘Well you’re not,’ said Sally, ‘so stay there, Bertie, or I’ll tell you off.’

  Bertie grinned, and wagged a finger at Ethie who stood half in and half out of the door. ‘Tonight is full moon,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a spring tide, and big bore up the river.’

  Ethie rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to upset her father when he wasn’t well, but she wished he wouldn’t fuss over her and keep telling her the same things.

  ‘Let her go,’ she heard Sally saying as she closed the door. ‘She loves the river. And I hope she does come back with a fish. We could do with it.’

  Ethie scowled and trudged out into the clear March sunshine. She walked down to the river, swinging the metal bucket. She wanted to be alone, like she was now, free of the expectations and the jealousy. The walk to the river was a wooded path with chaffinches and chiff-chaffs singing and blackthorn in full blossom, the verges yellow with celandine and dandelion. Corners of the river shone blue through the branches, then the whole vista opened up between two gnarled old pines, their bristly foliage covered in new cones. Wooden steps made from railway sleepers led down to the narrow beach and Ethie bounded down them.

  After checking that she was alone on the sand, she ducked under the steps, put her arm into a deep crack in the low cliff, and extracted the long-handled fishing net she’d hidden in there.

  ‘Just check the putts, Ethie. Don’t go trying to fish the pools,’ her Uncle Don had said. ‘You’re not experienced enough for that.’

  But Ethie had taken the net from the barn and hidden it. She’d use it to check the shallow pools that shone like opals in the sand at low tide. She found it more exciting than dragging a trapped fish out of the putts. Paddling up to her knees she often caught smaller fish, and once she’d gone triumphantly home with a conger eel in the bucket. How she had caught it was one of Ethie’s many secrets.

  In the warm March sunshine she stripped off her boots and socks, something else she’d been told not to do. The velvet sand and the chill of the water on her skin was soothing to Ethie. It cooled the eternal burning of her thoughts, the inner loneliness, the longing for transformation. She felt part of the river,
a rare contentment as she wandered from pool to pool, following ridges of hard sand encrusted with the myriad pinks and greys of tiny clamshells.

  Far out in the estuary, close to the deep channel of the main river, Ethie felt dazzled by her freedom, as if she looked down on herself and saw her spirit like a flickering candle, reaching out, longing to escape from the body she hated. Why bother to catch a fish? It was hot for March and she was sweating in her heavy farm clothes. Why not strip naked, roll in the crisp sand and let the cool river heal her burning skin? She looked back at her life and it was a switchback of rage and injustice, jealousy and pimples. It coiled after her like a poisonous snake. The only place she remembered being happy was in the water, swimming in the school pool, in the summer river at Hilbegut, rowing a boat across the winter floods with the white wings of water birds all around her.

  Ethie lay down on the sand and allowed herself to be sucked into a whirling dream where her itchy clothes became the soft satins of forgiveness, where her hair was long again and rippling like waterweed. She lay on her back and gazed through the shimmer of the sky to whatever was out there, to whoever may know she was lying there, a pearl in the oyster shell of day.

  ‘Why am I so horrible?’ she shouted at the sky. ‘Why have I got pimples and a fat body and a wicked deceitful heart? Why me? Why?’

  She listened for an answer, but nothing came. Only the burble of the turning tide flooding into the pools and stealing over the sandbanks and mud flats, glittering as it came. And in the distance the roar of the Severn Bore, foaming, gathering height as it funnelled into the estuary.

  Ethie sat up. She tasted salt on the wind. She looked back at the beach and the line of putts, and saw speeding water where sand had been. She looked at her hand clutching the handle of the fishing net.

  ‘What am I DOING?’

  She scrambled to her feet in a panic, and saw that she now stood on a narrow island of sand. It was shifting and crumbling under her feet as the brown water came churning in ahead of the spring tide.

  ‘Get back – get back.’ Ethie heard her own voice rasping like a storm twisting a stalk of barley. Clutching the net, she waded into the current, feeling the water sucking sand away from her heels. She was a strong swimmer, thank goodness, she thought. She kept wading desperately, waist deep, the water bitter and fierce around her body, dragging her heavy clothes, lifting her now, her chin suddenly in the water, her mouth spluttering, gasping with the cold. Fighting the weight of her sodden clothes, she swam vigorously towards the line of putchers. If she could only reach them, she could scramble to safety.

  In the hours she’d spent by the river Ethie had come to recognise the burbling roar of the Severn Bore. It excited her to watch the edge of creamy foam rumpling up the river hauling the tide like a great silver breath discharged from the lungs of the ocean. Hearing it now, Ethie knew she was going to die, and she shouted to the sky.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mum and Dad and Kate. I did love you. I did.’ And then she fought to stay afloat, the cold reaching deep into her bones, her breath lurching in her chest. She fought, and she cursed, and at last Ethie let go as the brown waters carried her swiftly upstream under the silent, watching, waiting skies.

  She uttered a final curse at the sky.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll be back.’

  Kate and Sally stood one each side of Ethie’s empty bed, looking at each other.

  ‘Come on Mummy. We’ve got to do this,’ said Kate.

  ‘I know. It just seems so final.’ Sally looked down at the neatly made bed with its white pillows and the green and black tartan rug that Ethie had always wanted. She was glad of Kate’s bright strength there in the room with her. ‘You’re too young to have this happen to you, Kate,’ she said, ‘especially just now, after losing our home and with you worrying about Freddie.’

  ‘I’m all right, don’t you worry,’ said Kate. Her toe touched Ethie’s slippers which were under the bed. She picked them up tenderly and put them in the wooden tea chest with the rest of Ethie’s things. ‘Now let’s start by folding the blanket.’

  Once the blanket had gone, Ethie’s bed looked ordinary, and the two women silently folded the heavy blankets and the starched sheets. Kate took off the pillowcases and added them to the laundry basket. Now they were looking down at the bare blue and white striped mattress and it seemed natural to sit on it and talk about Ethie.

  ‘If there’s anything of hers you want, you must have it, Kate,’ said Sally. ‘Her clothes perhaps.’

  ‘I don’t want her clothes.’ Kate shook her head adamantly. To her, Ethie’s clothes were gloomy, and touching them somehow connected her to all the unhappiness and the resentment her sister had emanated. ‘But I’d like this.’ She rummaged in the tea chest and took out a heavy navy blue book, its cover embossed with gold.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Sally. ‘The Water Babies. It was her favourite book. She was always reading it, even when she was grown up. Ironic, isn’t it? There must have been something in it, some truth that she needed.’

  Kate put the book on the windowsill. Outside, in the home field, baby lambs were scampering and blackbirds were warbling. Through the trees glinted a silver strip of river, and she looked away, suppressing the twinge of longing for Hilbegut.

  ‘We’d better turn the mattress, hadn’t we?’ Sally said, getting hold of the two fabric handles. ‘Lift it up, then we’ll put it on the floor and turn it.’

  They heaved the mattress and slid it onto the floor. Then both women gasped. Lying on the brown Hessian that covered the bed base was a pile of little blue envelopes.

  Kate went pale. She picked one up.

  ‘Letters. My letters. From Freddie.’

  Sally stood watching her, transfixed. Ethie had hurt Kate, even from the grave, and Sally felt devastated and ashamed. For the first time since Ethie’s death, Kate was openly weeping, her face red with fury as she gathered the precious letters, each one beautifully addressed to Oriole Kate Loxley in Freddie’s copperplate script.

  ‘How could she DO this? My own SISTER.’ She wept and wept, clutching the letters close against her heart. ‘How could she take Freddie’s letters? And why? WHY?’

  Sally put her arms round Kate and let her cry, but Kate whirled around out of the room and ran downstairs to her father who was sitting on a bench outside in the sun. By the time Kate reached him, she couldn’t speak for the sobs racking her body.

  ‘Kate!’ he said in surprise and held out his arms. She slumped onto his shoulder, the letters still tight in her hand.

  ‘What is it? My lovely Kate. Come on, don’t cry. I’m here,’ Bertie soothed, alarmed to feel Kate shaking all over. He hugged her close and leaned his pale cheek on her hair. ‘We’re all grieving for Ethie,’ he said, thinking he was sure to be right. But Kate sat up and looked at him, her cheeks flushed, her mouth twitching, and a look of burning fury in her eyes that Bertie had never seen before.

  ‘Kate?’

  But Kate couldn’t speak. She held it in, knowing that if she did speak it would be a scream that would never stop. Fearing she might crush them, she put Freddie’s letters down on the bench. Bertie glanced at them, his brow furrowed, then up at Sally who appeared in the door. He raised his eyebrows, questioning.

  ‘Freddie’s letters. Hidden under Ethie’s mattress,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Come here.’

  Bertie moved sideways to let Sally sit on the other side of him, and put his arms around both of them like the wings of an angel.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘No – don’t try to talk. Let’s just be quiet. Be quiet and listen. Shh.’

  At first Kate could only hear the awful sound of her own sobbing, and with each sob, a pain that felt like broken glass. Then she heard her heartbeat loud and fast, and her father’s slow, peaceful one, and Sally’s rhythmic breathing. She heard the chickens having a dust bath, their wings flapping madly, the baby lambs bleating out in the fields, the distant throb of Uncle Don’s tr
actor. She heard the blackbird singing and her father’s watch ticking deep in his waistcoat pocket. And then she heard the bees. She was back in the woods at Hilbegut, looking so deep into the blue of Freddie’s eyes as he told her the poem, and she felt love come flooding back into her being.

  She dried her eyes on Bertie’s hanky, and looked at her parents’ concerned faces.

  ‘What am I crying about?’ she said brightly. ‘I’ve got all these letters to read!’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ said Bertie. ‘My golden bird.’

  ‘Letter for you.’ Annie tutted, as she put the plump envelope on Freddie’s plate. ‘It’s got a Gloucestershire postmark. That Loxley girl, is it? Took her long enough to answer your letters! Looks like she’s got a lot to say. It’s a wonder that envelope hasn’t exploded.’

  Freddie picked up the bulging envelope and turned it over and over in his hands. He’d left the pain of losing Kate far behind, back in that autumn time of cold rain and Ian Tillerman’s eyes, and his motorbike going in the canal. He didn’t want to go back there.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ asked Annie sharply.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Freddie.

  ‘I should burn it.’

  ‘Burn it? Why?’

  ‘That Loxley girl’s hurt you enough,’ Annie said fiercely, her arms folded over her bust. ‘Just give me five minutes with her.’

  ‘Kate doesn’t deliberately hurt people.’ The look in Freddie’s blue eyes silenced Annie. She set about dishing up lunch, her cheeks twitching with disapproval. Freddie tucked Kate’s letter into his inner pocket to read when his mother wasn’t breathing down his neck. ‘This looks good, thanks.’ He rolled up his sleeves and tackled the steaming meal of steak and kidney pudding with purple sprouting broccoli and carrots. It calmed Annie to see him enjoying it. He knew she’d been trying to build him up after the long winter of illness, and it was working. It was good not to be hungry.